The competitor claims that this removes the incentive for action. This is not true. It removes one incentive out of many, and the worst and most injurious one.
It is an incentive which makes robbers, thieves, murderers and tyrants and produces a host of evils.
The competitor says it is unjust because it takes from wife and child their support. It does not. We give the wife a chance to be useful and an income for her use equal to the income of any.
We give the child his education and an opportunity equal to the best when he becomes a man. We insure these things and the husband and father is relieved from all worry on their account while he lives. Is not this worth many times the riches of the competitor which are so ready to vanish and leave wife and child in the ranks of abject and despised poverty.
The twentieth year of the Co-operative Commonwealth is indeed a proud one. The great state which we occupy is entirely under the control of the Co-opolitan Association. It contains four million people and two and a half million active members of the Industrial Army. Its inhabitants are all in cities, but no city is greater than one hundred and fifty thousand persons, except Idaho Falls and Shoshone, where the great water power, generating electricity, gives exceptional advantages for manufactures. Idaho Falls contains three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants and Shoshone two hundred and twenty-one thousand. In Shoshone are the great flouring and woolen mills, but nearly every needful and useful article is also produced through the medium of its marvelous electric power. Idaho Falls is more famous for its cotton mills, and other cities are numerous which are devoted to manufactures of various kinds. The city of Rokybar is the Pittsburg of Idaho and the Association steel works at that city are the largest in the world.
Laselle is the producer of beet sugar, and all the sugar used by our department stores in Idaho is supplied from our factories there. There is little necessity for the importation of anything into this state, so varied and abundant are its resources and productions.
These cities of Idaho are all laid out and conducted on the plan of Co-opolis. Each one of them covers an area nearly three times as large as that of any competitive city. The streets are all one hundred and fifty feet wide, consisting of two driveways fifty feet wide and a park of equal width separating them.
Numerous parks are located at convenient distances from one another. The buildings are all at least fifty feet apart. There is ample sunlight, pure air and space for children to play or for older people to take recreation.
There are flowers, fountains, artificial lakes and trees in profusion. Monuments and statues have been erected in many localities, representing art and history and illustrating the power and beauty of co-operation. The streets are all paved with asphalt. Most of our buildings are constructed of brick or stone and of the material necessary for the purpose Idaho has inexhaustible resources.
In this twentieth year of the Co-operative Commonwealth the United States is moving swiftly and quietly to that condition which Bellamy beheld in “Looking Backward.” Washington was the first state to join Idaho as a Co-operative Commonwealth, which it did in 1910. Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and California followed in quick succession in about the order named. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Arkansas, North and South Carolina and Texas are almost ready to wheel into line.